Anthony Doesburg: New Minister promises to take pragmatic line

If the information and communications technology community was surprised at John Key's choice of Steven Joyce as ICT Minister last November, so was Joyce himself.

Most money would have been on Maurice Williamson, the last Minister of ICT under National, to have landed the portfolio once again.

But Williamson's maverick tendencies clearly cost him the job - his suggestion during the election campaign that road tolls might be as high as $5 a journey under National was one of the party's few campaign stumbles.

Running the campaign was Joyce, a former private radio executive, head of a tourism marketing company and consultant to Key, who made it into Parliament on the party list and was slotted straight into Cabinet.

"It was a surprise but I'm really enjoying it. It's a fast-moving area and something I know a bit about."

He can't claim to know as much as Williamson, though, who worked in IT at Air New Zealand before becoming an MP 21 years ago, and is a Fellow of the New Zealand Computer Society.

Joyce, who calls himself an average computer user, resists comparison with his National predecessor's approach to the portfolio. To the frustration of many in the telecommunications industry, Williamson refused to use regulation to loosen Telecom's market stranglehold, setting competition back years.

It took the passage of the 2001 Telecommunications Act by the Labour-led Government, and the break-up of Telecom ordered by Labour ICT Minister David Cunliffe in 2007, to open up the market. But Joyce doesn't want to be compared with Cunliffe, either.

"It's about doing what works. I don't have a huge ideological bias. I probably bring an understanding of the commercial motivations, given my background, for a lot of this sector, which hopefully will be helpful."

His plan for the sector is to find "workable solutions that make sense and don't cost the taxpayer unnecessarily in terms of inefficiency".

With Labour having opened up Telecom's exchanges to competitors, the focus is shifting to the mobile market, divided between Vodafone and Telecom. This cosy arrangement ensures New Zealand mobile phone users pay about one-and-a-half times the OECD average for calls.

As NZ Communications attempts to start a third network, it's looking to the Commerce Commission - and ideally the new Minister - to end call termination rules that suit Vodafone and Telecom but disadvantage it.

But Joyce, aware NZ Comms has been trying to get a network off the ground for more than half a decade, is not about to step in while the commission investigates the issue.

"We'll just wait and see what the Commerce Commission recommends to me," he says. That will be in November.

Joyce's priority is working out how to implement National's election promise of a $1.5 billion investment in "ultra-fast" broadband. Anyone hoping to hear details in yesterday's ministerial address to the Broadband at a Crossroads conference, being staged by the Commerce Commission in Auckland, would have been disappointed.

The first glimpse of the plan will come in a discussion document due for release in a week or two. Joyce says the commitment is for 75 per cent of homes and premises to have 100Mbit-plus internet access within 10 years, probably via optical fibre.

Joyce dismisses the suggestion that the plan sounds like a guaranteed revenue stream for Telecom, which is busily deploying fibre to street-side cabinets up and down the country. One of five principles on which the plan will proceed is that it doesn't just "line the pockets of existing operators", he says.

On the contentious issue of new Copyright Act provisions aimed at curbing illegal music and other file downloads, the Minister has a bob each way.

Until the Government this week announced that the law change will be delayed, the provisions would have come into effect tomorrow, requiring internet service providers to pull the plug on subscribers who habitually breach copyright. Now, ISPs and copyright holders have been given more time to work out how the law might be applied.

"I completely understand where people are coming from on both sides of the debate," says Joyce - speaking before the delay was announced - "but there are some wider trade-offs for the country around this stuff as well." Overseas trade agreements require New Zealand to have such a law, although he thinks the Labour-led government, which passed the Act in its dying days, went too far.

To the question of whether he's illegally downloaded music himself, he gives an answer worthy of Bill Clinton: "I'm not sure, actually. I don't think I have, and if I did it would be going a fair way back."

John Key can feel happy that ICT is in a safe pair of political hands.

Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland-based technology journalist.